while to pause and consider. "It seems to me that in the movement of the thirteenth century there was something analogous to the times through which we of this present generation have lived. There had been nearly a hundred years of desolating wars. The Crusades had upheaved society from its depths, as a storm upheaves the ocean, and changed the condition of men and nations.... A generation sprang up physically predisposed to a sort of morbid exaltation, and powerfully acted on by the revelation of a hitherto unseen, unfelt world of woe. In the words of Scripture 'men could not stop their ears from hearing of blood, nor shut their eyes from seeing of evil.' There was a deep, almost universal, feeling of the pressure and burden of sorrow--an awakening of the conscience to wrong, a blind anxious groping for the right, a sense that what had hitherto sufficed to humanity, would suffice no longer. But in the uneasy ferment of men's minds, religious fear took the place of religious hope, and the religious sympathies and aspirations assumed, in their excess, a disordered and exaggerated form.... But what was dark misery and bewilderment in the weak and ignorant, assumed in the more highly endowed a higher form; and to St Francis and his order we owe what has been happily called the mystic school in poetry and painting--that school which so strangely combined the spiritual with the sensual, the beautiful with the terrible, and the tender with the inexorable--which first found utterance in the works of Dante and of the ancient painters of Tuscany and Umbria. It has been disputed often whether the suggestions of Dante influenced Giotto, or the creations of Giotto inspired Dante; but the true influence and inspiration were around both, and dominant over both, when the two greatest men of their age united to celebrate a religion of retribution and suffering--to solemnise the espousals of sanctity with the self-abnegation which despises all things, rather than with the love that pardons and the hope that rejoices--and which, in closing the gates of pleasure, 'would have shut the gates of mercy on mankind.'"